Media Representation CritiquePapers

This paper explores young women's understanding of feminism, particularly their perspectives on celebrity feminism. The research finds that while celebrity feminism is often criticized as superficial and lacking intersectional perspectives, it plays an important role as a 'gateway' or 'starting point' for attracting and guiding young girls to engage with and deepen their understanding of feminism.

Gwendolyn Mikell examines how African women’s political struggles are distorted when Western feminist categories or nationalist narratives claim to represent them without attending to material survival and local institutions.

This chapter from Collins’ seminal book *Black Feminist Thought* analyzes the controlling images of Black womanhood in U.S. culture - such as the mammy, matriarch, welfare queen, and jezebel - and how these stereotypes function to justify intersecting systems of race, gender, and class oppression. Collins argues that these images are ideological tools used to regulate Black women’s labor, sexuality, and social roles.

In this seminal essay, Laura Mulvey introduces psychoanalytic theory to film criticism, coining the concept of the 'Male Gaze' to reveal how classical Hollywood cinema constructs images of women around male visual pleasure.